Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted Israel’s ambassador to Mexico in a thwarted assassination attempt last summer, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.
The IRGC’s Quds Force orchestrated the plan against Israeli ambassador Einat Kranz-Neiger, which was active through the first half of 2025 until Mexican security services neutralized the threat, Axios reported Friday based on conversations with U.S. and Israeli officials.
An operative in Unit 11000 of the Quds Force, a secret unit in Iran’s global terror network, led the initiative and spent several years operating out of Iran’s embassy in Venezuela and recruiting agents throughout Latin America.
The Quds Force was also responsible for similar recent schemes against Israeli officials in Australia and Europe, according to Axios. In August, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador, closed its embassy in Tehran, and declared the IRGC a terrorist organization, citing “credible intelligence” that Iran was behind anti-Semitic terror attacks. The same month, Austria granted round-the-clock protection to the head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, which is based in the country, in response to a “specific Iranian threat.”
Iran’s attempt on Kranz-Neiger is “further evidence that Iran has an extensive overseas network plotting against American and Israeli targets, including in Latin America,” according to U.S. officials who spoke with Axios.
“This is just the latest in a long history of assassination attempts by Iran around the world targeting diplomats, journalists, dissidents and anyone who disagrees with them,” one U.S. official said—”something that should deeply concern every country where there is an Iranian presence.”
In the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. election, the IRGC recruited several agents to “focus on surveilling, and, ultimately, assassinating, former President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” a November 2024 criminal complaint read. One of the accused agents said Iran had spent “a significant sum of money on efforts to murder [Trump] and was willing to continue spending a lot of money in its attempt to procure [Trump’s] assassination.”
“Israeli intelligence and security community will continue to work tirelessly, in full cooperation with security and intelligence agencies around the world, to thwart terror threats from Iran and its proxies against Israeli and Jewish targets worldwide,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein said.
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